 Hi, I'm Megan Humphrey and I am the Executive Director of Hands and we are a small non-profit in Burlington, Vermont. And our mission is to get food to adults who are 50 years and over and we have a few programs. One of them is this great Hands in the Dirt Gardening Program which we partner with Garden Expert Charlie Nardosi and I even wore my Peapod earrings just for this. We also do a meal and gift bag delivery all over the county on Christmas Day. And we have nutrition education workshops called Hands in the Kitchen and we've also just started partnering with Heineberg Senior Center during this time of COVID to set up a brand new program called Support Buddies. So we really want to thank Charlie so much for coming in today and he is going to be talking about mid-season gardening. So Charlie take it away, thank you. Thank you Megan and it's great to be here. It's always great to be involved in gardening activities especially at places like our Lady of Providence and whoever else is out there watching or listening to this webinar. This is the second in a series. We did one on spring gardening and now we're into June. Things have changed dramatically from May to June. If you remember back, hard to believe a month ago it was snowing and it was freezing out. Now, of course, we're in the middle of a heat wave if you're watching this live on June, what are we here? June 23rd. Look at that. On June 23rd. So what I'd like to do today is do a short presentation all about things we should be thinking about in our garden, in our June gardens. Many of us have put our gardens in last month and things are growing for better or for worse but there are a lot of things that we really should be thinking about doing to create a better garden, a more productive garden, and one that's going to last all season long. That's really a key thing and now is the time to really act on a lot of things. All right. So June garden tune up. This is a time of year that's kind of critical to make sure things are really growing strong because we're really trying to set up having July, August, September being really productive months in the vegetable garden. And one of the first things we want to think about doing is thinning and spacing if we haven't already done this. I realize some of these chores and tasks might be things you've already done and you're on top of it. Great. Good for you. But I'm just going to try to cover all the bases here and put it out. And one of the things about thinning and spacing is that you need to thin certain vegetables enough so that they have room to grow. A good example is what's on the screen right now, which is carrots. If you don't thin carrots, you'll get small spindly little carrots. So at this time of year, you should be thinning them to about four inches apart. That's pretty much true for beets as well. Radishes could be thinned to a couple inches apart. So any of those root crops need room to expand to grow. If you planted onion sets or plants, you wanted to have those at least about six inches apart as well so they, again, can form those nice big bulbs. But it doesn't stop there with the thinning and spacing. If you got a little overzealous in your garden, which we often do and it's hard not to do that, we have a couple extra cucumber plants. We have a couple extra squash. If you pop them in, maybe forget about the proper spacing. That's something you might want to come back to. So if you have cucumbers, you should have the cucumbers good eight to 12 inches apart for the individual plants, giving them plenty of room to grow up a trellis or along the ground. For zucchini and summer squash, you want to have those probably about a foot or so apart. For bigger plants like tomatoes, those should be three feet apart. For peppers and eggplants, you can be a couple feet apart. The idea is that you don't want to have them overcrowded. Looks like a lot of open space now is going to quickly fill in over the next month. So if the plants are overcrowded, they're not going to flower and fruit as well because they'll be competing for nutrients and for water since it's been so dry. So take a look at your spacing of your plants that either you put in originally or ones that came up from seed and make sure you have the proper spacing for each one of them. Now this time of year is also a good time to do a little pinching, a fun activity. If you have plants like basil, for example, or any of the herbs, oregano and thyme, this works on too, or if you have some flowers, say you have some zinnias out there, it's good to pinch the tops of those plants now. And the reason for pinching the tops is that you want to create a bushier plant. I know that the temptation is, oh my God, I've got basil. I want to pick every leaf of it. But if you spend a little time just pinching a few of those plants now, taking the top two or four leaves off, just with your fingertips, just give them a little pinch. What will happen is that all the buds lower down. If you look at this image on the screen of the basil, you can see there's little leaves kind of going down that stem. If you pinch to right above those leaves, those leaves will form new leaves, new stems. You'll get a bigger and a bushier plant. So pinching now is going to give you dividends later on, whether it be with basil, with marigolds, with calendula, with zinnias, like I mentioned, a lot of different plants. Also, when you start harvesting, and I'll talk more about this as we go along, you want to harvest early and often. I know some people, my neighbor included, are already harvesting summer squash and zucchini, much to my jealousy. He did a great job getting them off started earlier, and they're a protected spot, and they're just going gangbusters. So you want to harvest those plants when the fruit is small, and there's a reason for it. Not only is the fruit tastier and it's more tender, but it also keeps the plant producing. So if you let that zucchini or that cucumber get really big, sometimes happens with zucchinis unintentionally, like something you would float down the Onuski River in, if that happens, what happens inside that zucchini or that cucumber is that the seeds mature, and when those seeds mature, it sends a message back to the plant to stop producing more fruit. Job is done, good job, take the rest of the summer off. So you want to be picking early and often. I often will pick zucchini when it's a very small stage, even with the flower attached. Cucumbers, when they're four to six inches long, beans is another one that does this. Those bush beans or pole beans, if you can harvest those before those bean seeds start maturing inside, getting those little bumps, that's going to be really good to set up more harvest going throughout the summer. Another thing you might want to look at, and again, this all depends upon your situation, is if you have some scraggly little plants, especially things like eggplants and peppers and sometimes tomatoes, even though most people's tomatoes now are probably grown pretty strong, but if you have little scraggly plants of peppers, of eggplant, some squashes, winter squash, melons, and they start flowering, even though the pepper plant or the plant leaves are very small, and the plant is not very big. That's not a good idea. So the best thing to do is to pick off that first flower. Oh, I know that might kill you to do that, but the reason for it is that the plant will send more energy into the leaves, more injury into the root system, so you won't get that first fruit, but all the other fruits that have come will be bigger, healthier, and you'll get more of them. Now, again, if you've already kind of gone through this and you've kind of moved beyond that stage and you have big pepper plants, you know, I have big pepper plants right now, or big tomato plants, then this doesn't pertain to you, but if you have some small plants that you maybe got in a little bit late and they're just kind of limping along, don't let them flower. Let them get a leg up, let them get some nice big leaves, and then you can start letting them to set their flowers. Also, if you haven't noticed, it's dry out there. We've been in a drought now for most of the spring and it's really been accelerated with this heat wave that, again, if you're listening live on the 23rd of June, we're still right in the middle of it. It's about a week of 90-degree days with wind and a lot of sun. So watering is key and it's really important that you water well, whether you have raised beds or in ground plants. Now, if you have raised beds that have legs on them, so you have a small box, basically, where the soil is, those you're probably gonna have to water daily, especially when it's really hot and really windy and really sunny because they're gonna dry out really fast. If you have bigger beds, maybe ones that are up two to three feet tall, those you probably don't have to water daily. Those you could probably go a couple days without watering because there's such soil mass there that's gonna hold more of the water. Also, it depends on what kind of plants you have. If you have little baby plants, if you have plants that are just popping out of the ground like a carrot or a beet or a lettuce or a bean, you're probably gonna wanna water daily in any situation because the roots are so shallow that that shallow top layer of the soil is gonna dry out every day. That's what happens in our garden. Every day it dries out. Those are the ones I have to water daily. But if you have transplants like a tomato or a zucchini or a cucumber and they're pretty well established now, you can go a couple days without watering them unless you have those shallow beds or unless you have containers. Those you're probably gonna have to stay on top of the watering. You can automate this a little bit too. So you can get what we call soaker hoses. So that black hose in between the rows of beets and carrots there is a soaker hose. And that just oozes out water from the hose and you hook it up to a regular garden hose which hooks up to your faucet. You turn it on and you just leave it on until the water sinks down a good six to eight inches. That's kind of the rule of thumb you wanna have. Six to eight inches is how deep you want the water to sink down into. So a couple ways you can measure it simply is to get a pencil or get a little, even like a little rod or something of that nature that measures six to eight inches, push it down into the soil and see after you've watered is it moist all the way down at the bottom. If it's done that then you want a time how long you had to run that hose to get it that deep. And that's what you'd use going forward into the future. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, no matter what it is. You keep that number in mind. What's nice about this soaker hose system it's called the snick and drip in that you can create little juncture hoses, junction hoses that will connect the soaker hoses without having to have the soaker hose run through pathways or across the lawn. You're not wasting water this way. And you can also put a little timer on it in the faucet. So if you have a hard time keeping up with watering using something automated is great. And as I mentioned, if you have containers those are exceptional because you have a small soil mass that's gonna dry out really quickly. But I would still check it. You know, we have some pretty big containers and I haven't had to water those every day. They also are in a little bit of a shady spot where they don't get sun in the afternoon and that'll make a difference too. So if you're worried about your containers they look like they're drying out too fast. Plants aren't doing well. You might wanna protect them from that hot afternoon sun during these hot dry days. Weeding is another thing that we all wanna do right now. Well, not maybe in 95 degree temperature. First thing in the morning and late in the evening. That's the time to weed. And it's good to do some weeding now even if you don't see a lot of weeds. And the reason is they're coming. Either they're germinating now and there's little baby seedlings you can hardly see coming up or they'll be germinating really quickly. The way you wanna weed is using that hoe on the left hand side of the screen. That's what we call a collinear hoe or it's a small sharp bladed hoe. What's nice about it is that you just drag it along the soil surface and it pulls out those weeds. It just scalps them or pulls them right out. The nice thing about this way of hoeing is that you're not digging down into the soil so you're not bringing up the other weed seeds that are lurking under the soil that'll germinate. So it'll keep an ongoing process. If you keep doing that, you'd have to be weeding every week. This way, if you keep weeding like this through June and into early July for the rest of the summer, you won't see so many weeds. If you have bigger weeds like a dandelion, for example, you might wanna use that tool on the right there. And these come as hand tools or long handled tools. And those have more of a claw on them that'll enable you to go down and really pull out that weed down at its roots. And then once you're done with your weeding, you wanna do some mulching. And this could be, again, in a raised bed or it could be an in-ground garden. Even in a container garden, you could do this. You can use straw, which is usually a preferred mulch that keeps the soil nice and moist and keeps the weeds from growing. I use hay because it's just readily available where I am. I know people are concerned about weed seeds. I haven't seen that many, at least in the hay that I've gotten. Sure, there's some grass that comes through, but it's easy to kind of pull it out. And for the most part, it makes life a lot easier. If you have a container, you might get a little shredded bark mulch or bark chips and put those in there. That would be another way to protect them. You can use other materials like chopped up leaves or untreated grass clippings from a lawn that hasn't had herbicides on it and sprinkle that around too. Ideally in a garden or in a raised bed, you wanna have about four inches or so of a nice mulch layer. In a container, you can go a little shallower because you don't wanna bury the plants too much. But mulching is a great way to conserve water, help with weeding and keep your plants growing strong. Now, if you have tomatoes, you're gonna wanna support them if you haven't already. I always will support our tomatoes right after I plant them, so I don't have to think about it, but sometimes life gets in the way and you don't have time to do everything. So you'll often find people using these kind of tomato supports. These are the four-ring tomato cages. Very common, great for a big plant, but what starts out as a little plant in a big cage quickly can turn into a big plant in a little cage. As you can see on the left-hand tomato plant there, it's already growing outside of its cage, hasn't even had its fruit start to ripen yet, and it's already that big. So these tomato cages are good for certain usages. They're good for tomatoes that are what we call determinant, meaning that they grow up about three feet tall, set their fruit, and that's about as big as they get. So they get about as big as that tomato on the right. That's nice for these cages, because the cage is strong enough to hold them up and they won't flop over. Celebrity is a variety of tomato that is a determinant tomato. However, there are a lot of other tomatoes, especially the ones that we love, like the Sun Gold Cherry Tomatoes or the Red Cherry Tomatoes, or the heirlooms like Brandywine and Cherokee Purple and Mortgage Lifter, those are all great plants, but they are what we call indeterminate plants, meaning that they'll keep growing and growing and growing until frost or disease or you get sick of them and you knock them down. So that'll be more like that tomato on the left, and what ends up happening is it outgrows as a cage, it starts setting fruit, and then when you get a big summer thunderstorm or a windstorm, it knocks the whole thing over. So you have to be careful if you're growing those indeterminate plants to get a strong cage. It could be, you could use these cages, but I would put in a stake or two to help support that cage. Another thing you could do is the old Italiano way of growing tomatoes like my grandfather Rocco used to do, you get one stake, one plant, you trim off all the side branches of that plant so you have one main trunk. If you look really closely, you could probably see that one main trunk going up the stake that's there, and you prune off the lower leaves and then you can see the fruit sets there and then you let it continue to grow up. The nice thing about this is it keeps everything neat and clean and you get, you can see the fruit and you get less disease because they don't have those lower leaves. The downside is you're gonna have less production, less fruit this way, and I think personally the fruit doesn't taste as good because you don't have as much photosynthesis happening from the sun, you don't have as many leaves, so you're not getting as much sugars going into the fruit. But you can try it out and it certainly works really well in a small space area like in a raised bed where you do a little pinching and try it. You can try a couple different ways. Or you can use some of these, what I call Space Age New Cages. This one's called Vertex Gardener Supply Cells, this one. And this, you can buy the small one you can see down there in the foreground or you can make it a double decker and get the big one you see in the background there. What's nice about these cages is that they're lightweight aluminum cages. They're pretty sturdy, they don't rust. They fold up really easily to store in the winter. You can just hang them in a basement somewhere really simply. And if you look closely, it's a little hard to see, but on the bottom one you can see they have these little clips. And so if you forgot to put your cage on your tomato and the tomato's really big, instead of trying to squeeze that cage on there, like you're trying to squeeze your bathing suit on after a really ambitious winter, instead of having to squeeze it in and breaking branches, what you can do instead is just wrap it around and use that clip to clip it together. So that's a nice feature of this Vertex Tomato Cage. So think about supporting your tomatoes. You wanna keep them off the ground so they don't rot or have the animals get the best of them. Also another thing to do this time of year is some summer fertilizing. So vegetables have probably been in gardens for a week to six weeks, four to six weeks by now. And some of the things like spinach maybe, or even lettuces might have bolted. And so now you find yourself with a bed or part of a bed that's open, you can do some more planting in that bed. Before you do that, put some compost in and maybe put some organic fertilizer in. Also, if you're growing long-season vegetables, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, cucumbers, melons, anything that's gonna take a whole season of growth, you want to add a little side dressing of that same granular fertilizer probably once a month. So do it now, do it again in July, do it again in August. That's gonna help keep the fruits coming, keep the plant growing strong so you continue to get those cucumbers and squash right into the fall. Now there's some problems that have been happening out there you might have noticed on your plants. And a lot of it is attributed to the heat and the drought. Like I said, it's been very dry in the spring and especially the last couple of weeks. And now we've been having these record high temperatures. So what happens is the plant has these different defense mechanisms that it puts in place to survive. One of them is you'll start seeing these leaves curling. This is a tomato leaf and you can see it starts curling and that way it reduces the amount of exposure it has to the air and so it doesn't evaporate water as quickly. If you can't do that fast enough what ends up happening is you see all the brown edges on those leaves, that's leaf scorch. That happens because the plant is transpiring so much moisture that the roots can't keep up. And so those leaves at the tips of those leaves are the first ones that'll kind of brown and shrivel because they can't have enough moisture from the root system to keep them green. Luckily a lot of this will be a changed around once we get cooler weather and once we get some rain or once you do some heavier watering on them. So don't get too frustrated if you see these kind of leaves and leaves scorching out there, leave them as they are. If the whole leaf of course dies and the whole branch is dead, you can take it off. But if the leaves are still green, leave them as they are it's more likely that they'll survive. So let's talk about a few pests because I know everyone's really wondering about what's going on pest wise. Those black things you see on your screen are aphids and aphids are like the rabbits of the insect world. They reproduce really quickly and often we'll find those on basil or on flowers or on the stems of eggplants or leaves. They like the new growth, they like the new leaves. Now the little critter on the left there is a ladybug beetle and she's going to have a little snack. That's good, we wanna encourage them. The little critter on the right is an ant and that ant is actually a farmer. He is farming those aphids trying to get that sticky sweet substance called honeydew from them to bring back to the hive. So you've got the ladybug trying to eat the ants and the farmer trying to protect the ants because he's farming them almost like a crop. Now you might see this kind of damage. I know I've seen it in our garden and you'll see it on spinach leaves, beet leaves and Swiss chard leaves in particular. It's called a leaf miner. Now leaf miner is an adult fly that lays the egg on the leaf, the egg hatches into a little caterpillar. It's so small it actually tunnels in between the layers of the leaf causing all this damage you see here. The best way to control the leaf miner is to do what we call sanitation, meaning go through, you see leaves that have the leaf miner damage, just pick them off, just pinch them right off. And it's important though, not to drop them, but to take them away, put them in a garbage or put them somewhere away from that area so those insects won't come back and re-infest other plants that you have. Often with the leaf miner, one last thing about that is it comes in cycles. So you'll get it in the spring with a lot of those spring greens and then in the summer you don't see it much and then it sometimes comes back in the fall. So you have to be aware of how those life cycles work. Also you can plant resistant varieties of plants. So everyone loves squashes and this of course is a butternut squash. But what'll happen sometimes in mid-summer is that that butternut squash plant will just start wilting for seemingly no reason at all. Even though the ground might be moist, it just starts wilting. If you go back on the stem all the way back to the crown you might find this kind of damage. Now that's kind of disgusting, doesn't it? Those little white things you see on your screen are the squash vine borer caterpillars and they have started to bore into the stem and they'll start boring away from the center of the plant. And in the process, they're inviting bacteria and fungus and diseases to come in and that's why the plant starts breaking down. Now if you see this happening and the plants are wilting and you notice the borers are there, what you can do, or you see little borer holes, is take a sharp knife and just cut along the stem, gently pull it apart and you can pull the little caterpillars out by your fingers and then you can just feed them to the chickens. That's why you should have chickens, huh? Or if you don't want to do that, you can just toss them on the lawn. I think the birds will have them for a snack. So a way to get around the squash vine borer is to grow squash that don't get it. So butternut happens to be one of those types of squash that does not get the vine borer. But your zucchinis and your summer squash and your acorn squash and Hubbard squash and pumpkins will get it. So you have to be on the lookout for that kind of insect that might be attacking your plants. This one is a common one you probably are already familiar with. It is the cabbage worm. If you look on the back of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale plants, anything in that family, Brussels sprouts plants, and you see a little white butterfly floating around the plants. That's the adult. It's laying the eggs on the leaf, the leaf on the underside of the leaf. And actually you can see a little egg there. If you look really close, you see that kind of pale yellow little dot right below the caterpillar? That's the cabbage worm egg. So the cabbage worm, of course, eats the holes in the leaves. And if you get a lot of them, it could really deform the plant. So the best thing to do, and I'll talk more about this, is to exclude that cabbage worm adult from laying the eggs, or by checking on the underside of the leg, look for the cabbage worms and again, pick them off or squish them with your fingers. Those are the best way to ensure more sure fireways to control them. If you have cucumbers, chances are you're probably gonna see cucumber beetles, these black spotted or striped, depending upon the type you have, will often go after the yellow flowers and after the leaves and causing all kinds of damage. You can sprinkle something called diatomaceous earth, diatomaceous earth, which is kind of a small little diatoms in a powder form and has sharp little skeletons. It's not sharp for our touch, but it's sharp to the beetles. They don't like it and that sometimes keeps them away. You can also trap these with yellow sticky cards. Get these little yellow cards, put some Vaseline like material on them and put them right next to the cucumbers and the beetles will be attracted to those and not your plants and they get stuck and they die on them. So it's important to kind of control cucumber beetles before they get an upper hand. If you have raised beds, especially tall raised beds, this may not be a problem. I've noticed that they don't seem to notice plants that are up tall on a tall raised bed or in a window box, for example, any place where it's kind of elevated. Even those elevated beds that are on legs might be a good place to grow cucumbers for that reason. But a lot of these insects can be controlled without having to do any hand picking or spraying just by using what we call barriers. So this is a barrier called a floating row cover and you can just drape this over your plants. There's different weights of it. This one is the insect weight. It lets in air and water and it works really well. But this is my favorite for insect control and it's called micro mesh, micro mesh. And it's made kind of like a window screen material. You just drape it over the plants. I have some little wire hoops in there you can see that's keeping it off the plants but it's very lightweight. It lets in air, light and water and you can see through it. But the thing I like about it more so than the row covers is that it's long lasting. It's much more durable. It'll last for years whereas the row covers sometimes break down over time. So using these barriers over almost all your vegetables can really prevent damage. You can get hoops that are really tall for tall vegetables. The only vegetables you can't do this with are the squash cucumber pumpkin family because they need cross pollination from bees. Pretty much everything else would do fine. Another thing you can look for are eggs. So look on the bottom side of squash leaves for these eggs or the bottom side of potato leaves for the potato beetle yellow eggs. And because these little eggs look very innocuous but they'll turn into the squash bug which can make a mess on your squash and melons come August and September. So by finding those eggs on the bottom there and squishing them or just cutting them out if you don't want to squish them it's a good thing to do. They're not out yet but in the next couple weeks you'll start seeing them flip over the leaves, look for the eggs if you see them they're all lined up like little soldiers or copper colored cut them out or squish them and you won't get so many of these. Another thing to look out for come July is the tomato horn worm. Now this creature is literally that big. It grows four to six inches long and even though it's huge it's amazingly camouflaged. It'll be on your tomato plant and you'll never notice it but you'll notice the damage. You'll see on the tops of the plants lots of leaves have been eaten and chewed down. It looks like almost like deer have gotten in there. It's probably not deer it's probably a tomato horn worm. Start looking for little black, dark green blackish droppings on the leaves. That's the poop from this tomato horn worm. And a lot of times you look down and look back up again you can often see the tomato horn worm up there. So keep your eyes peeled for this. If you see some damage get on it fast because these guys eat a lot really quickly. And like I said it's usually in July some time where you start seeing the damage. Now I know it's been hot and dry and you probably haven't thought much about slugs but they're out there and they're just waiting for a rainfall. Or if you've done some mulching they're lurking underneath there and they wanna start getting into your lettuce and getting into your basil and getting into all your plants. So you can control them even starting now with beer traps. This is one Wendy and I put together a very simple one, took a hummus container put in some very cheap beer. I think it was Coors Light but don't tell Coors that. Cheap is what I could find. And just place it around the plants where you think you've seen damage. And what happens overnight is that these slugs that you can see them floating there they try to stretch out and get to the beer and they flop in and they drown in the beer. What a way to go, huh? In the morning you scoop out the dead ones put a little more beer in and on and on it goes. Now this works great but it might invite other critters to come in too like some dogs or last night in our house we had raccoons in our garden and they started hooting and howling and we couldn't, one in the morning couldn't figure out what was going on then I realized oh they drank all the beer and they were drunk raccoons. Nothing worse than a drunk raccoon I tell you. But it's a good control for slugs. If you have someone who is a sheep farmer or you know where you can get some raw wool using wool as a mulch is a good way to keep slugs away because they don't like crossing those barriers that scratchy kind of barrier. So just put it around, I saw this first saw this in England and they were doing it around hostas but it'll work around any plants and that's a nice barrier to keep the slugs and stales from eating your plants. If you have containers you can use copper flashing or copper strips, you can buy these or get these and you just wrap them around and catch it to the top rim of your container and as that slug comes up and tries to cross the copper it gets an electrochemical shot, doesn't like it turns around and goes somewhere else. So there's a lot of fun little things you could do if you're starting to see some slug damage out there besides having to hand pick them which is kind of a squeamy little thing to do. And I wanted to talk just a minute about a few diseases and one with them of course would be powdery mildew. Now we're not seeing that quite yet because it's so hot but once it gets cooler especially as we get towards July and August, cooler in the evenings you start seeing the white powderiness on those leaves. You can get varieties of squash and melons that are resistant to powdery mildew, nice thing to look for. You can do some preventive sprays of baking soda or serenade which is an organic fungicide or you can even just pick off those leaves when you start seeing that damage to reduce it so you don't get so much. It's okay if a few leaves have it especially when you get to August, September but you don't want to have the whole plan in a day because it'll cut down on the production. And then finally I want to end on a planting note because it is only June. You can still plant a lot of things including plants of tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, squashes, cucumbers and melons. You can still be seeding beans. You can seed beans right to the end of July or you can do greens. So here we're doing succession crops of greens. You could see that there's different greens that are planted at different times and this is a nice way to plant to use that space in your raised bed where if you only have a one or two raised beds it's a nice way to maximize the space but also get a consistent supply of greens or beans or carrots or beets or whatever it is you want right through the season. So you don't get that whole glut of them and then you have nothing for the rest of the season. We often will plant succession crops of bush beans for that reason so that we'll go to the end of July planting bush beans so we have beans, fresh beans, not ones that are old all the way into September and October. So continue to think about planting especially as other plants either are finished producing or die, you can continue to add things to that garden. So hopefully everyone will have a happy garden. This of course, Megan recognized the Canal Street garden that we did a few years ago and a very successful garden in a very harsh and climate and harsh environment. And this is one from Megan and she has a question about cucumbers. Get the same leaf scorches, tomatoes. I put in some lovely healthy cucumbers but now they look awful. Yes, Megan, that does happen. You'll see the brownie edges of those cucumbers happens on squash cucumbers, especially if it's a small plant that doesn't have a good established root system it's drying out faster than you can water it. You know, you might have to water it twice a day almost to keep up with it. So that's probably what's happening to those. Hopefully if you have the green leaves in the center are still green and still growing, it'll outgrow that especially once the weather breaks a little bit and then the cucumber will come back and you'll still get some fruit. To my knowledge right now there are no home garden genetically modified vegetables. There might be a few that they're working on but I think 99.9% of the vegetables out there for a home gardener are not genetically modified. So they're not gonna have that growth that Sister Arlene was kind of referring to. But it is true that if the plants are growing bigger and bigger and are growing abnormally big or abnormally fast, there are insects like the aphids for example are really gonna kind of glom onto those because it's got a lot of food for them. So you certainly wanna have a healthy plant but you don't wanna have an abnormally healthy plant with too much fertilizer, too much compost that gets huge and it becomes like a buffet for the insects and animals. Charlie, I have a question about pastile soap and also the baking soda that you mentioned as a potential pest deterrent. Could you talk about pastile soap in terms of pest control? Well, pastile like any of the liquid types of soaps is fine to use in a diluted form as a spray. And it's called insecticidal soap. You can buy formulations of that from a garden center. You can make it yourself as well. You just don't wanna have, you just need a couple of drops in a little spray bottle. You don't need a lot to be effective and you wanna spray it for what we call soft-bodied insects. So like aphids that I just was talking about are white flies or mealybugs. Insects like that that have soft bodies it'll kind of break down quickly because of the soap. So yeah, it's fine to do that and you can make your own baking soda sprays and that's another one that's commercially available but you can also make your own. And I believe, I'm gonna go out on a limb here if I can remember my recipe for it. I believe it's a tablespoon of baking soda. Yeah, a tablespoon of baking soda, a teaspoon of like a liquid soap, like a castile soap and then in a gallon of water. And you mix all that up and you spray it and if it's different than that I'll let you know but I think that that's the recipe. And you wanna spray it as a preventive that's the really important thing because it's not gonna stop those diseases once they start but it'll stop them from getting started in the first place. How often would we do the spray, Charlie? If you're trying to prevent like powdery mildew probably every week. Okay, on a weekly basis. Now I just have one more question. Would you recommend, so could you tell me the difference between hay, straw and the mulch in terms of what would you recommend and where would we get it? Sure, so straw is what's usually recommended cause it's made from like wheat and rye and they take all the seed heads off. So you're just getting like the straw. You're getting the stalks of the plant. So you don't have any weed seeds or grass seeds in it and that's why straw is recommended. The downside of straw is it's very expensive especially around here. So if you have a small garden and you just need one bale it might be fine but if you need like five or 10 bales it gets kind of pricey to do that. The alternative would be using chopped up leaves not just whole leaves from last fall but chopped up ones that are shredded or grass clippings that you can sprinkle in there as a mulch. Or you can use hay, now I know a lot of people say that hay has weed seeds in it, grass seeds and that's true but my experience is if you put a thick enough layer of hay down you might get some grass and things germinating but it's not a lot and hay is so much cheaper and so much easier to find around here than the straw. And that's gonna also hold in moisture. Right, it holds in the moisture and prevents the weeds from growing. So your plants especially during conditions like now will do much better. Thank you all for coming and we'll do this again soon and I'll be seeing you in the garden. Thanks Charlie.